Prayer – Matthew 6; (Luke 11)
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Prayer – ; ()
In the life of Jesus prayer was the work, and ministry was the prize. Jesus sweat great drops of blood in the Garden of Gethsemane where He “offered up prayers and supplications with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death” () Why could He not approach this ordeal like His three sleeping friends? Was the prayer the big deal or the aftermath? Yet when it came to the events to follow it was not He who fell apart but His three sleeping friends who fell away. Luke particularly is interested in Jesus’ prayer life, clearly intimating in 22:39 that prayer was one of Jesus’ customs, along with Sabbath day worship ().
In we find the disciples asking Jesus to “teach us to pray as John (the Baptist) had also taught his disciples”. They did not ask for Him to teach them how to preach, or minister, or lead singing, or even how to evangelize, nor any other elements; just “teach us to pray”.
We have heard many times the title “The Lords Prayer” is a miss name, we instead point to the long prayer found in the Gethsemane account. But do we realize the primary reason? The Lord Himself would not pray this prayer because He could not have joined the petition to “Forgive us our” sins or debts or transgressions as He had none. He could not pray lead us not to temptation, as He was specifically tempted to show us victory over temptation is a possibility. He could not pray deliver us from evil, as that is exactly the ministry configuration of His mission.
In Luke, Jesus introduces the prayer by saying, “When you pray, say … ” (v. 2). In Matthew, He introduces it by saying, “In this manner … pray … ” (v. 9). This implies that Jesus intended it to be prayed both literally (Luke) and in principle (Matthew). We will be focusing on the principles.
The model prayer is an outline of prayer content for the believer, but it is a specific prayer. It has specific topics and an order built within its outline. The first three topics are about God: His Personhood, His Program, and His Purpose. The next three topics are about us: our Dependence -- His Provision, our Depravity – His Pardon, our Deviance – His Protection.
1. PERSON OF GOD –
“Our Father who art in heaven…”
New Testament prayer is based on understanding the nature of the Father and our relationship to Him. Jesus begins our prayer not just with a greeting of familiarity, Our Father, but a conversation about who God is. His name, which is His character (pregnant within our experiential formation), is addressed but then His character is exalted. The focus of the address is not to whom, but rather to what as a whom. He is The Sovereign Creator Sustainer God of the universe that we have in our relationship through Christ as a Father. Not everyone can call God Father. Only those who have come to grace in Christ can say with correctness “Father”. (NAS But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name,)
God does not exist some austere place off yonder. He is a participant in all elemental aspects of existence. John, first chapter, as well as other multitudes of scriptures makes completely clear His direct participation in the sustenance of the world. His hand is clearly on every pulse of every heart in existence. He is not aloof or removed; heaven may be His address, but His abode is in us. . “In heaven” emphasizes His transcendence. NAS By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit.
“Hallowed be Thy Name”…
We sometimes fail to acknowledge the hallowedness of God’s name as we call Him Father. Holiness is a fleeting concept in the world and culture of our society. Sanctification or holiness is too frequently glibly cast aside, and our prayer address “Father” sometimes misses the mark in realizing the magnitude of the expanse between our existence as sinful people and the exalted perfect Holiness of God, and just as significantly His wants and expectations for our holiness. (; ) Inherent in the petition is an expression of committed worship, the petitioner making himself available to the Father through righteous living and availability to His service.
We must determine to let God be God of our whole life – all aspects – everything.
Because ours is an age of religious pluralism and syncretism (that is, a diluting of truth for the sake of unity), Christ’s lordship is deemed irrelevant by many religious groups that believe one religion is as good as the other. His preeminence is denied by others that place the Christian stamp upon a fusion of beliefs from several religions; More recently dilute the Word of God in an effort to tickle the ears by errant doctrine. () Usually hailed as an advance beyond apostolic Christianity, this blend promises self-fulfillment and freedom without surrender to Christ.
Paul’s use of the word “Lord” nine times in indicates that Christ’s supremacy impinges upon every aspect of their/our relationships and activities.
“Jesus is Lord” is the church’s earliest confession. It remains the abiding test of authentic Christianity. Neither the church nor the individual believer can afford to compromise Christ’s deity. In His sovereignty lies His sufficiency. He will be Lord of everything or not Lord at all. (Adapted from: HAYFORD’S BIBLE HANDBOOK)
NAS And those who know Thy name will put their trust in Thee; For Thou, O LORD, hast not forsaken those who seek Thee.
The “awe” of God is diminished, even lost on many. The Old Testament prophets and people of God did not dare considered Father an option. The awe of God overshadowed any conception of the intimacy found in the Fatherhood of God. Yet, the New Testament uses the title hundreds of times. The intimacy of calling God our Father is only afforded to us by His gift of His grace and mercy and the faith He gives us.
NAS Let us therefore draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and may find grace to help in time of need.
When we get the correct perspective in our relationship with our created-existence to the Creator God and Father by grace and mercy, it leads us to be able to participate in the next phase in the prayer outline.
2. PROGRAM OF GOD –
“Thy Kingdom come”
We note that the next focus of the model prayer is an element not devoted, to the persons of prayer but rather the focus is on the program of God – “Thy Kingdom come”. It is founded in the hope in, and expectation of, the return of Christ to reign on earth, and the full manifestation of His rule. History past, present, and future is not just a set of cogs moving endlessly in rhythm with no beginning and no direction or end. Ralph Waldo Emerson dismissed history as “the biographies of a few great men”.
The Bible however is the story of God, and Jesus the Christ and his intervention in the workings of Holy Spirit. Your Kingdom come is the expression of hope and anticipation for the day when the groanings of the earth will cease, when sin is removed, and God’s perfection will reign, and Christ eternal kingdom will be established. The phrase however implores that our will shall be submissive to and subject to His will, and all our little kingdoms which matter so much to us shall be brought down. Too frequently, we express desire for His return, but with the caveat not immediately.
The consummation of His Kingdom is a foregone conclusion – He is GOD, but our acceptance and indeed our anticipation of that completion is a life changing evolution. In this is an implied request of the petitioner to live the kingdom ethics necessary to advance kingdom purposes. If we are too attached to this world to anticipate, almost anxiously, the consummation of His perfect earthly reign, we have a grievous gap in our spiritual understanding of the disparity of our sin filled world and the richness of God’s love and desire for our life.
“Unless I am sufficiently concerned about God’s sovereignty to make my life His throne, and make it my daily purpose to bring every individual whose life I touch into willing and glad submission to Him, I cannot pray these words with integrity. We dare not pray for His rule over others unless we honestly desire his rule over us.” (Haddon Robinson)
Every knee shall bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. (; )
3. PURPOSE OF GOD –
“Thy will be done”…
Unlike many of our praying habits, next in the prayer’s outline is not a list of requested concessions or even confessions, but rather a contemplation of His agenda and parlance of what He is about. There is an acknowledgement of His supremacy and our submission to, and service to His will. There is an overt recognition that there is a difference between our agenda, motivations and directions and His purposes, but yet we profess to desire His purposes in preference to our own.
Our subordination (not just our submission) changes our parlance in our prayer thinking and directs the orientation of our focus in prayer and life.
The “essence of evangelism is that people everywhere will hallow God’s name by allowing God to be God in their lives”. (Haddon Robinson) This essence is the beginning of the principle of this element of the prayer outline: His will being done is the precept of all believers’ lives.
We frequently get our prayers topsy-turvy in so much as we have a list of requests we want God to do. The real focus of a mature prayer is the seeking and pursuing of God’s purpose and will in our life and in the world. Prayer is not asking God to fulfill my will; it is asking that God’s will be done in my life, and in my associates’ lives.
It is possible to pray for God’s will while resenting that God is God. Many people despise God because He has not made them master of their fate, captain of their soul, and rulers of their own destiny. But those who know God and have a relationship with Him can understand His love and grace and can take comfort in that all things work for the good. If we are fulfilling the request thy will be done we can rest by faith assured He will take care of us. Only when we possess that understanding and own it, i.e. make it our own, can we pray with sincerity thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And so pray that His name will be hallowed, and He will be God to us, and His will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven
But in this prayer, we are asking for a line of fire to be directed at us, it is enemy territory in which we are praying. Success in our own life is only possible through God’s provision.
4. PROVISION OF GOD –
“Give us this day our daily bread”…
Jesus is making several points within His petition to “gives us our daily bread”. The traditional explanation is the reference to the Israelites as they were traveling through the wilderness. The often parched dry barren land would have a difficult time providing for a population of people the size of St. Louis Metropolitan area traveling and trampling under foot the very ground necessary for food production. Recognizing our dependence on God for even the most rudimentary requirements for subsistence is just plain obvious.
Within our relationship with God is the promise to give us what we need for His service -- Jehova-Jira (the God who sees-after). Pastor Hayford comments that “the most important thing about this is not the discovery that we can ask for God’s help in the mundane matters of our personal lives. The most important thing is that we are told to [ask].… Back-to-back with prayer that the Almighty’s will be worked on earth, we should not overlook the simplest matters of life.” Paul encourages us in (NAS) And my God shall supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.
In the original text the word daily is used here singularly and nowhere else, including all other known texts and literatures, until recent archeology found a papyrus fragment of a “grocery list” of a housewife that contained the word “daily” – “enough for the coming day”.
1967 evpiou,sioj epiousios {ep-ee-oo'-see-os} • perhaps from the same as 1966; TDNT - 2:590,243; adj • AV - daily 2; 2 • 1) word found in the phrase 1a) the bread of our necessity 1b) the bread that suffices for each day
“Daily” as a word seems to be related to the word
1966 evpiou,sa epiousa {ep-ee-oo'-sah} • feminine singular participle of a comparative of 1909 and heimi (to go);; participle • AV - next day 2, following 2, next 1; 5 • 1) to come upon, approach 1a) of time, to come on, be at hand, next, following, on the following day
In essence the word concept here is on the verge of completion, or have completed, with no next in sight. It includes the idea of barely essential, scarcity but fulfilled. It really represents the principle of faith living and dependent believing and expected (not presumptuous) deliverance – Hebrew 11:1. This is an anxious experience for most people, especially here in the US where we need everything in excess; the bigger the pantry the better, “Better to have and not want than to want and not have.” In our culture we strive to eliminate the concern for having to be dependent on God, (after all “He is so unreliable, and unpredictable”) – and there is no excess in daily.
We need only go back one generation in time to realize how completely dependent even our great society is on God. The life of the Roaring Twenties came to an abrupt end as we plunged deeply into the Great Depression. Although a substantial life segment of the population became lame with depletion, that generation effected also discovered the necessity of shared dependence.
Jesus’ phrase also includes “our”, plural indicating understanding that if God gives me two loaves, one is for sharing with the one who has a need. My excess is not for storing – it is for sharing.
NAS And God is able to make all grace abound to you, that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed;
5. PARDON OF GOD
Forgive us our debts/trespasses – our sins
Psychologist to Mr. Figby (cartoon strip fame) “Mr. Figby I think I can explain your feelings of guilt. You are guilty.”
In our culture, even within the church, we spend great resources trying to assuage our emotional imbalances by not accepting our guilt. Statistically, the primary cause of emotional instability is guilt, estimated at nearly 60 percent of emotional issues. We simply do not want, will not allow ourselves, to acknowledge our guilt before God. We are aware of our deficiency, but will not acknowledge it. Thus we are carrying, literally to our grave, a burden we need not endure.
Worth noting in Jesus model, asking for provision is before asking for pardon. God gives us all things. It is not a bargaining for trade, He simply is the proficient sufficient provider. In this He has provided an opportunity to relieve us of our sin guilt in the offering of His Son as a sin sacrifice.
When we earnestly ask for forgiveness we are reassessing the value of our real worth downward. Our self-esteem will be placed into perspective. We are evaluating ourselves and finding ourselves wanting. When I recognize the pollution in/of my own life, it will also produce less resistance for me to forgive another person in their struggles with offenses.
NAS (a) No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man;
NAS for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,)
Those who live in the relief of God’s pardon, find it easier to forgive the offenses of others. Forgiving spirit is the evidence we have entered into the forgiveness of God’s pardon and redemption.
6. PROTECTION OF GOD
“lead us not into temptation…”
This phrase is called a litotes, which expresses something positive by negating its opposite. The logical understanding is “Keep me out of the way of tempting sin opportunities.” (”This is no small matter”, means it is a big thing.) This is also a difficult petition because of the ambiguity of a Greek word, peirasmos, translated here as “temptation.” Should it be rendered “temptation” or “testing”? Both are legitimate renderings of the Greek, yet both have their own difficulties because of other scriptures (; , ).
A circumstance may be neutral, except within our own interpretation and mental manipulation we allow ourselves to interpret the conditions as tempting. The presence of a stimulating circumstance is tempting because we apply it – temptation comes from within. We dwell when we should flee. Let’s be real — We seldom want to be delivered from temptation … otherwise it is not actually a temptation! If we did not feel the compulsion to comply, the impulse to participate, it is not temptation.
NAS No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man;
and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, that you may be able to endure it.
But temptation is not the problem – it’s our failure to runaway that is the problem; we don’t seek deliverance before the sinning. We have a colloquialism that is frequently sited “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.” We don’t need forgiveness if we rely on the promises of the scripture to deliver us from evil and provide us a way to escape, and then escape.
“but deliver us from evil…”
Of some significance is the word used by Jesus translated deliver (in both transcripts of the prayer, Luke and Matthew). It is not the more common word used for deliver.
3860 paradi,dwmi paradidomi {par-ad-id'-o-mee} • to give over into (one's) power or use; to deliver to one something to keep, use, take care of, manage; to deliver up one to custody, to be judged, condemned, punished, scourged, tormented, put to death
Rather Jesus used a word seldom used, and even considered obsolete in some dictionaries. But in context here, it is curious to note it is not “snatch out of harm” and set aside, it is “draw near to one’s self”. Jesus is asking in the prayer not that God just set us out of harm’s way, but that He, God, brings us to Himself, and we respond with drawing nearer.
4506 r`u,omai rhoumai {rhoo'-om-ahee} • to draw to one's self, to rescue, to the deliverer;
It has the image of a parent hugging the child after some dramatic rescue on the nightly news; Images of the return of the prodigal son.
When Jesus taught this prayer I believe He intended to reinforce the principle of the dire consequences of temptation and deliverance from it. Falling prey to the sin in temptation for a Christ follower is a need for rescue. It is not a deliverance of 3860 paradi,dwmi paradidomi for condemnation, it is 4506 r`u,omai rhoumai rescued and drawning closer to God.
We are surrounded by seductions to live a life apart from God, but God seeks us, and deliverers us. If temptation were repulsive or obvious we would not be beguiled – but it is not. Our mind set must be focused in the struggle on the Spirit’s leadership, the love of God, and the sacrifice of Christ to guard our hearts and life.
NAS There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. 3 For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. 5 For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. 6 For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace,
NAS But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.
But, we must acknowledge the influence of Satan in our lives to be successful in overcoming.
“Evil one” is not a true translation.
4190 ponhro,j poneros {pon-ay-ros'} • translated as: evil 51, wicked 10, wicked one 6, evil things 2, misc 7; 76 • 1) full of labours, annoyances, hardships 1a) pressed and harassed by labours 1b) bringing toils, annoyances, perils; of a time full of peril to Christian faith and steadfastness; causing pain and trouble 2) bad, of a bad nature or condition 2a) in a physical sense: diseased or blind 2b) in an ethical sense: evil wicked, bad
This rendering of “evil” (hardships and toils — not a one) also relates to the understanding of the translation of the Greek word, peirasmos, translated here as “temptation” to be translated as “testing”. The “evil” is the hardships of the sanctified life, and basic challenges of living, testing us in our trust relationship with God.
The pretense in the addition of “one” in some translations is the seeming necessity to believe there is an ulterior responsible party for our bad choices, when we make them. But the emphasis in verbiage is the divine governess of God over the affairs and circumstances of life. In the prayer, the word is about hardships, perils, pains, and wickedness. These are the elements of life we want to avoid because they are onerous– difficult, often resulting from sin choices.
NKJV I pray not that thou should take them out of the world, but that thou should keep them from the evil. (; ; ; ; )
In the case of this passage, the usage by Jesus is about sanctification, not hardships.
Satan is definitively a deceiver, crafty beyond all scope of our understanding, but desperately wicked is the phrase used to describe our heart
(KJV) “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately (incurably) wicked (or sick): who can know it?”
Only God can know the hearts and the minds of men. And because He knows He sent a redeemer in Christ to deliver us, and save us from ourselves, and the wiles of Satan. Thanks, Praise, and Honor be to God our Father.
is the source of the last phrase frequently added to the public rendition of the model prayer. Oldest manuscripts do not have the phrase “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen”. It is believed that scribes added the phrase to be used as a liturgical addendum in the public forum. (And it makes a really awesome ending to the song.)